EDGE Plus/Minus (EPM) and a new efficiency measure applied to the 2026 Club Nationals GABT data
November 4, 2026 by Paul Würtztack in Analysis
Welcome to Better Box Scores Metrics. It is anchored by EDGE, which converts goals, assists, blocks, turnovers, and yards gained into one metric, while accounting for the scoring and turnover environment.
Although still limited to Goals-Assists-Blocks-Turns (GABT), Nationals is the best club-player data dump of the year. With All-Club selections around the corner (and with all the standard caveats regarding the limitations of player summary stats for revealing true impact or why a team wins), BBSM is happy to weigh in on the most impressive stat lines of the tournament.
The mission is to ensure that we’re not misguided by the tantalizing simplicity of traditional +/-. (In The Odyssey movie this past summer, if you listened closely, you would have heard the Sirens singing “just add GAB and subtract T”). The problem, in a nutshell, is that +/- assumes that the cost of a turn is constant and applies equally to handlers and cutters, which can lead to highly distortive assessments, particularly in the women’s division.
This year, we’re offering two alternatives to +/-. The first is the metric we introduced at this time last year, EDGE Plus/Minus (EPM). That article contains the rationale and methodology in full, but we’ll review it quickly below. The second metric is a yardage-free cousin of Player Efficiency Ratings, which we’ll just call Eff.
Better Box Score Metrics: A BBSM Look at 2026 Club Nationals Player Stats is only available to Ultiworld Subscribers
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